Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  But the other Afghanistan—that rural world of village republics, feudal lords, tribal chieftains, and conservative clerics—resisted the pull. Isolated from outside cultural influences, they nursed the antipathy that had formed toward the British and their culture, and they jealously embraced the old values and the luxury of being left alone to practice their own ways. A cultural tug-of-war developed between Kabul and the old Afghanistan. It pulled the country increasingly further in each direction, as first one side then the other gained the upper hand. For many Afghans, Amanullah’s reforms marked a swing to the most shocking extreme. Yet the backlash that brought Bachey Saqao to power left the country traumatized and frightened. Once order had been restored, the new dynasty had its work cut out: the contradictions of Afghan society had not been resolved. Western powers still loomed over the country, the ruling class still aspired to move Afghanistan into the modern world, and the old Afghanistan still threatened to erupt violently if anything they valued changed. Steering the country through these rocks became the fundamental project of Afghan rulers over the next half century, a quest that promoted the dominance of Kabul.

  14

  After the Storm

  AT FIRST, NADIR LOOKED LIKE A GRIM REPLAY OF THE DREADED IRON Amir. He declared himself the champion of old Afghanistan. He vowed to preserve traditional tribal society and defend the religion that gave it unity and purpose. His rhetoric led clerics and feudal landlords to suppose that he would stamp out every vestige of Amanullah’s reforms. His first rulings sent women back into the lockbox and deployed religious police to patrol the streets, as in the days of Abdu’Rahman. Nadir confirmed the property of feudal landlords and declared the Hanafi version of the Shari’a the law of the land: no ruling could supersede it, no code compete with it.1

  Actually, despite appearances, Nadir and his brothers were modernizers. Their ultimate vision for Afghanistan was not so different from Amanullah’s. They just had a different idea of how to get there. The key word for them was caution. Change would come, but it would be deliberate, slow, and closely managed. The Musahibban had taken a lesson from Amanullah’s career. They understood that the hundreds of thousands of traditional leaders still wielded decisive clout in Afghanistan. The rural, feudal world was still the dog, the cities just the tail. They decided to treat the clerics and elders as partners—while undercutting their power.

  Nadir didn’t do very much of this himself. He reigned for only four years. He had to devote the bulk of those years just to securing his throne. Amanullah still had followers, some of whom hated Nadir as a usurper and a British stooge. The Charkhi family had been especially close to Amanullah and seemed to pose the greatest threat, so Nadir destroyed them with a ruthless brutality not seen since the days of Abdu’Rahman. He had their patriarchs arrested and executed on no charges; he had the top member of the family beaten to death while he looked on.2

  Amanullah’s loyalists struck back. An Afghan student assassinated the king’s brother in Germany. Six months later, Nadir attended a highschool awards ceremony for academic high achievers. One of the boys was my father, then in tenth grade. Another was a boy raised in a Charkhi household. My father and this kid played soccer together after school, and that week the boy had bragged that he would soon make some shots that would be remembered in history. My father assumed he meant soccer shots on goal. The next day, at the ceremony, when the king arrived, my father witnessed this boy stepping out of the line to shoot Nadir dead. The king’s three surviving brothers retaliated by executing all the adult male Charkhis and putting all the women and children of the family in prison.3 It sounds bad, and it was worse than it sounds, but by 1934 the struggle had ended, and Afghanistan settled into the grim quietude usually described euphemistically as “stability.”

  Immediately after Nadir’s assassination, something unprecedented happened—or rather, didn’t happen. The late king’s surviving relatives did not tear the country apart in a savage internecine power struggle. The tribes did not rise, the other ethnic groups did not try to break away. Instead, Nadir’s brothers installed his nineteen-year-old son Zahir Shah on the throne, and they all pledged fealty to him. The eldest of the brothers took over as prime minister and did the actual ruling. The other brothers took the key cabinet posts: defense and foreign affairs. The next tier down of relatives and close associates got the next tier down of government positions. The real ruler of the country for the next forty-four years was not an individual but a family that operated like a well-oiled collective machine. From time to time, one prime minister would step down and another member of the ruling family take his place, but, if these changes reflected backstage power struggles, it wasn’t obvious from the outside. As far as the public could tell, the Family made decisions by consensus in private councils and showed a seamless front to the world.

  Zahir Shah was a figurehead, yes, but a vital one, a vital piece of a governing collective. With him at the prow, his subjects could feel they were ruled by an embodiment of Afghan grace. Holding power entailed killing and breaking and torturing, and all these horrors were done, but the public did not associate them with the king, who became instead something of a beloved figure. He was always seen in an impeccable suit or a perfectly tailored military uniform. If a photograph of him in traditional native garb existed, I never saw it. His portrait appeared on the wall of every public office and on the frontispiece of every grade school textbook, but, once he reached the vigorously mature age of thirty-five or so, the portrait stopped aging. The real man went gray, lost hair, and got wrinkles, but his image stayed forever young.

  Once in a while, over the next forty years, some tribe revolted, and on those occasions, the Family showed its teeth. Early on, it built an army no single power in the country could match. More importantly, when one tribe revolted, other tribes still sided with the royal government, because the Musahibban were not simply tyrants but masterful politicians who understood the nuances of Afghan culture and used diplomacy as much as force to hold the country together. Once in a while, a dissident, drawing inspiration from the heady days of Amanullah, fired a critical salvo at the government, but he vanished quickly into some secret dungeon, for the Musahibban revived Abdu’Rahman’s network of spies and his secret police system, and they had no compunction about using it ruthlessly when they felt the need.

  For the most part, the Family’s combination of repressive brutality, cultural grace, and domestic diplomacy kept Afghanistan remarkably calm for the remainder of the thirties, throughout the forties and fifties, and deep into the sixties.

  In the countryside during these decades, life went back to the older version of normal, the one predating the upheavals of the Amanullah era. The government still collected taxes and stationed its officials in every district, but they left the rural power structure out there more or less undisturbed and gave every appearance of respecting the elders and revering the clerics and honoring the autonomy of the tribes. They also let the nomads roam freely along their old circuits, making a mockery of borders.

  Above all, the government renounced any jurisdiction over the internal affairs of families. Every man’s home was his castle—such was the official attitude. Fathers who wanted to betroth their infant sons to their cousins’ unborn daughters and have the match consummated as soon as the girl hit pubescence could do so: who was the government to say no? Guys who wanted to drink whiskey within the walls of their own compounds could do so, as long as they didn’t smell of liquor in public. Their own families might sanction them, but what they did at home was no business of the government’s. In short, the new dynasty not only respected but enforced the separation between the public and private worlds that was traditional in Afghan culture.

  The Musahibban monarchy was a tyranny, no doubt about it, but a tyranny in service to Western-oriented development. The government kept a firm grip on the levers of repression and gave every reassurance to the hidebound masses and their ultraconservative leaders, yet right from the start it was t
aking baby steps toward changing the country into a modern nation.

  Just before his death, Nadir had a constitution written. It was an extremely conservative document that gave absolute control to the royal family and legalized the power of clerics and big landowners, but it was a constitution and it planted the idea, at least, that even kings were governed by some framework of law.

  Nadir also established a parliament of sorts, the Shura-i Milli or National Council. Some members of this body were appointed by the Family, others were the Family’s chosen candidates, “elected” without opposition in their districts. The parliament’s function was only to give government decisions its (rubber) stamp of approval, but at least it planted the outer form of democracy, a shell that could be filled in later (and was).

  The royal family shut down most of Amanullah’s schools but slowly opened them again. The number of students dropped from a high of eighty-three thousand in Amanullah’s days to a little over forty-five thousand during Nadir’s reign,4 but at least the royal family nurtured the idea of modern education as a good thing. It’s true that students in those government schools studied Qur’an, Qur’anic recitation, theology, and Arabic grammar—which undercut any complaints the clerics might have lodged—but they also studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, European languages, geography, drawing, and world history—a complete secular curriculum.

  The Family even established a few primary schools for girls. When those excited no blowback, one of them was allowed to grow into a girls’ high school called Malalai in honor of the heroine of the battle of Maiwand. There, the daughters of aristocratic families studied side by side with girls from less distinguished families. When Malalai set off no cataclysm, a second girls’ high school, Zarghuna, was opened, and after that came more.

  These schools incubated the leaders of a women’s movement in Afghanistan, which would grow and flourish over the next four decades—leaders such as Kobra Noorzai, who became the first Afghan woman to achieve cabinet rank when she was appointed minister of health in 1965. Another star student was Massouma Esmatey who later wrote a landmark book The Position and Role of Afghan Women in Afghan Society and at one point served as minister of education.

  The Family resumed Amanullah’s policy of sending four or five of the best and brightest boys from Kabul’s high schools to European and American universities each year. No one mentioned that Amanullah had pioneered this practice.

  My uncle Najmuddin was in the second of these groups to go abroad. He attended Tufts University and became a dentist; but when he returned to Afghanistan and set up a practice, royals and aristocrats insisted on being seen whenever they pleased without appointment, which so offended my uncle that he shut down his practice and retired. Eventually, in order that its investment in his education not be entirely wasted, the government put him on retainer as an advisor to the Ministry of Education, and in this role he wrote textbooks for the government schools and helped translate the Encyclopedia Britannica into Farsi and Pushto.

  Another student sent abroad in the early thirties was a disgruntled Tajik intellectual named Hammad Anwar. He married an American woman and brought her back to Afghanistan with him. She insisted on appearing in public whenever she wanted and refused to wear a chad’ri, which put her husband on such a collision course with the royal family that finally, for their own safety, these two slipped out of the country and never came back: another scholarship wasted.5

  Nadir’s assassination alarmed the royal family so much, they suspended the scholarship program for a few years, but in 1937 the five top graduates from each of the city’s high schools were again sent abroad, to Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States depending on which foreign language they had studied. My father graduated from Habibia that year, so he and four of his classmates were sent to America. The prime minister warned the boys not to get mixed up with any foreign women, but my father broke the injunction and married my mother in Chicago. The government canceled his scholarship and called him home, but she came with him and spent the next twenty years in Afghanistan. Two of the other four also ended up marrying American girlfriends, and a third married an Indian woman studying in America. They all returned to Afghanistan with their foreign wives. The government decided to overlook the disruptions set off by these marriages, and so their husbands stuck around, entered government service, and contributed to the development of the country. By relaxing its restrictions on marriage between Afghans and foreigners, the government was able to get some benefits out of its scholarship program, and the country took another small step toward joining the twentieth-century world at large.

  In 1932, with help from the French, Afghanistan established a medical school, the first germ of Kabul University. Later in the decade, students coming back from abroad formed new faculties—a college of engineering, a college of science, and so on. My father headed up the College of Literature and taught courses in psychology and education, his areas of graduate study. Slowly, Kabul University grew into a full-fledged academic institution.

  From the government’s point of view, the secondary schools were not just an instrument for producing an educated workforce but a mechanism for creating national unity. Every kid in every school had to study Pushto because the Family declared Pushto the national language, even though more than half the citizens could not speak it. Pushto was chosen because it was the (original) language of the ruling clan and because it helped the Family cement its ties to the powerful rural tribes of the south and southeast, who spoke only Pushto. The elite members of the royal clan grew up in Dari-speaking Kabul, so many of them no longer spoke Pushto themselves and had to learn it in school. The constitution listed Dari as a second national language—as a sop to the fact that this was the language the greatest number of Afghans actually shared.

  Amanullah had established a national holiday at the end of summer called Jeshyn-i-Istiqlal, “the Festival of Independence.” The Family revived Jeshyn as yet another instrument for building a sense of nationhood. They turned it into a weeklong holiday centered around government-sponsored entertainments, the biggest of which were held in Kabul. Afghans from all parts of the country made the pilgrimage to the capital each August for the excitement and merrymaking of Jeshyn. Everywhere they went on the festival grounds, alongside posters of King Zahir Shah, they saw pictures of his father Nadir Shah, peering out through round spectacles, the image of a prim, stern scholar: the man who won independence for Afghanistan, the father of his country, the national hero. Amanullah was never mentioned, and his image was not seen anywhere. It was as if he had never existed, even though he was still alive somewhere in Italy, making furniture. Slowly, slowly, he vanished from the country’s collective memory.

  Amanullah had launched a radio station; the Family now put Radio Kabul back into service, and it began to broadcast music and propaganda (represented as news) to every Afghan who could acquire a radio. Even rural Afghans were proud to have something so modern as a radio station. No one mentioned that Amanullah had founded this institution. It was a credit to the new dynasty.

  Under Habibullah and Amanullah, a few capitalist entrepreneurs had emerged; under Nadir and his brothers, the strongest of these swelled to enormous size. Abdul Majid Zabuli, who had started as a cotton merchant, now became a cotton magnate. He secured monopolies of the trade in edible oil and of state transportation and soon accumulated enough capital to establish his own bank, which made private industrial development possible. During the forties, Afghan entrepreneurs built factories to process cotton, make textiles, and the like. It’s true that all the new industries were heavily controlled by the government; and that, in order to start a business, one needed permits; and to get the permits, one needed connections; and to activate those connections, one needed to cut members of the royal clan in for a share of the profits—yes, all of that was true, but at least a trickle of industrial development did begin.

  Habib Tarzi, the first Afghan ambassador to the United States,
presented his credentials to President Truman in 1946, and Afghanistan joined the United Nations as well. That same year, Tarzi visited a San Francisco–based engineering and construction firm, Morrison Knudson, the company that had spearheaded the building of Hoover Dam across the Colorado River. He met with them to propose an audacious project.

  Afghanistan was flush with cash at that moment. During World War II, by sticking to a dogged neutrality, it had been able to sell its products to all sides. Afghan nuts, fruits, and foodstuffs had flowed to India to supply the troops. Karakul lambskins had sold blazingly well in the United States, in part because this was the fur used to line bomber flight jackets. The belligerent countries paid with cash because they had nothing to export, their economies being directed entirely toward war. As a result, Afghanistan had sold a great deal and bought very little and thus had come out of the war in a good position to go shopping.

  The Family had a plan for spending that cash. The country’s biggest river flowed through its flattest landscape, and they thought that if the waters of the Helmand could be used to irrigate the barren flatland, that desert could be made to bloom. California had done just such a thing by building Hoover Dam and using the Colorado River to irrigate the Imperial Valley, turning a desert into a fertile farming region.

  Now Tarzi wanted to know if Morrison Knudson would consider building a couple of dams and a network of canals in Afghanistan for $10 million. Morrison Knudson said they would give it a go. The San Francisco construction company and the central Asian nation formed a joint company, Morrison Knudson Afghanistan (MKA). American engineers, Filipino construction technicians, and Afghan administrators moved to the Helmand Valley to get started. The Afghan government built two small towns called Chainjeer and Lashkargah to house them.